Canvas Printing Tips
The photo you choose should be something that is timeless. Something that appeals to your eyes and mind, or of an event you won't forget, so you do not get tired of it!
Have you ever wondered about inkjet vs dye sublimation printing?
Left Above: ‘AnneHerbert’ canvas print of Cammy taken at 18 inches away, using a macro zoom to show the detail within the eyes and the brushstrokes of the actual artwork.
Right Above: Our competitor's canvas print of Cammy taken at 18 inches away using a macro zoom and at a distance. It’s impossible to see the actual detail or brushstrokes of the actual artwork.
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Left Below: A 100% crop of the same shot, still clearly showing the detail within the eyes and even as far as the detail of the brushstrokes within the painted outline of the face.
Right Below: A 100% crop of the same shot, showing that there has literally NO detail captured on canvas from original file, yet the same file was supplied to both companies.
Getting a better looking colour to greyscale conversion
If you have a colour image you want to convert to greyscale, you can choose greyscale from the mode menu in PhotoShop. However, PhotoShop just discards the colour and you end up with a pretty bland looking greyscale image. When you go under the image menu and under Mode choose greyscale, it does not have any colour to throw away and so every shade of colour is preserved but only in greyscale.
To get a better looking greyscale, go to the channels palette and click on each individual channel colour (the Red, Blue and Green). These channels appear in greyscale by default and more often than not one of those channels on its own makes a pretty good looking greyscale. Keep that one and discard the other two.
Avoiding pixelation
When resizing an image, making your image smaller is good, but making it bigger could be tricky. Scalling an image down in size increases the resolution of the image, and generally does not affect it. It sometimes makes it lose a little clarity, but the amount varies from image to image. However, increasing the size, usually a low resolution image (72dpi for example) will cause the image to be blurry and pixelated. So, starting with a large image and scaling down is far preferable than starting with a small image and scaling up.
If you must start with a small image, if you're shooting digitally, try a minimum, 5-megapixel camera so you start with a large image that you will likely want to scale down. If you're scanning it, try to scan it at a high enough resolution to keep the image from falling apart (e.g. 600dpi).
